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. 2021 Sep 27:15:715818.
doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2021.715818. eCollection 2021.

Online Statistical Learning in Developmental Language Disorder

Ágnes Lukács  1   2 , Krisztina Sára Lukics  1   2 , Dorottya Dobó  1   2
Affiliations

Online Statistical Learning in Developmental Language Disorder

Ágnes Lukács et al. Front Hum Neurosci. .

Abstract

Purpose: The vulnerability of statistical learning (SL) in developmental language disorder (DLD) has mainly been demonstrated with metacognitive offline measures which give little insight into the more specific nature and timing of learning. Our aims in this study were to test SL in children with and without DLD with both online and offline measures and to compare the efficiency of SL in the visual and acoustic modalities in DLD. Method: We explored SL in school-age children with and without DLD matched on age and sex (n = 36). SL was investigated with the use of acoustic verbal and visual nonverbal segmentation tasks relying on online (reaction times and accuracy) and offline (two-alternative forced choice, 2AFC and production) measures. Results: In online measures, learning was evident in both groups in both the visual and acoustic modalities, while offline measures showed difficulties in DLD. The visual production task showed a significant learning effect in both groups, while the visual two-alternative forced choice (2AFC) and the two acoustic offline tasks only showed evidence of learning in the control group. The comparison of learning indices revealed an SL impairment in DLD, which is present in both modalities. Conclusions: Our findings suggest that children with DLD are comparable to typically developing (TD) children in their ability to extract acoustic verbal and visual nonverbal patterns that are cued only by transitional probabilities in online tasks, but they show impairments on metacognitive measures of learning. The pattern of online and offline measures implies that online tests can be more sensitive and valid indices of SL than offline tasks, and the combined use of different measures provides a better picture of learning efficiency, especially in groups where metacognitive tasks are challenging.

Keywords: acoustic segmentation; developmental language disorder; online and offline measures; statistical learning; visual segmentation.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Stimuli of the visual non-verbal segmentation task ordered into triplets.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Task procedure.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Median RTs by Block and Group in the acoustic verbal target detection task. TD, typically developing children; DLD, children with Developmental language disorder; TRN1, First training block; TRN2, Second training block; TRN3, Third training block; RND4, Random block with disrupted structure; REC5, Recovery block.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Accuracy rates by Block and Group in the acoustic verbal target detection task. TD, typically developing children; DLD, children with Developmental language disorder; TRN1, First training block; TRN2, Second training block; TRN3, Third training block; RND4, Random block with disrupted structure; REC5, Recovery block.
Figure 5
Figure 5
Learning indices of the two groups in the acoustic verbal segmentation task.
Figure 6
Figure 6
Median RTs by Block and Group in the visual non-verbal target detection task. TD, typically developing children; DLD, children with Developmental language disorder; TRN1, First training block; TRN2, Second training block; TRN3, Third training block; RND4, Random block with disrupted structure; REC5, Recovery block.
Figure 7
Figure 7
Accuracy rates by Block and Group in the visual non-verbal target detection task. TD, typically developing children; DLD, children with Developmental language disorder; TRN1, First training block; TRN2, Second training block; TRN3, Third training block; RND4, Random block with disrupted structure; REC5, Recovery block.
Figure 8
Figure 8
Learning indices of the two groups in the visual non-verbal segmentation task.
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